Wide reforms urged to help UN heal rifts

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The United Nations has proposed the most sweeping reforms in its
history, recommending the overhaul of its key decision-making
organ, the Security Council, and holding out the possibility of
granting legitimacy to some preventive military strikes.

The wide-reaching reforms were outlined in a much-awaited report
commissioned by the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, a year ago after
bruising division over the Iraq war left the UN feeling
ill-equipped to meet modern-day challenges represented by
terrorism, failed states, nuclear proliferation, poverty and
violence.

The most attention-getting recommendation is an expansion of the
Security Council to 24 members. But the 16-member panel that made
the proposals, including Gareth Evans, the former Australian
foreign minister, was unable to agree on one proposal and ended up
suggesting two options.

At present the council has five veto-bearing permanent members -
Britain, China, France, Russia and the US - and 10 members elected
to two-year terms.

One alternative would add six permanent members - the likely
candidates being Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Egypt and Nigeria
or South Africa - as well as three new two-year term members. The
other would add eight semi-permanent members chosen for renewable
four-year terms and one additional seat with a two-year term to the
existing 10.

The right to cast vetoes, a power coveted by the nations seeking
permanent status and one they would probably continue to press for,
would still be limited to the five original permanent members.

The panel's 101 recommendations will inform a report in March
from Mr Annan, who is expected to refine them to eight to 10
principal subjects to be taken up at a heads of state summit at the
UN in September, before the opening of the General Assembly.

Many of the recommendations in the 95-page report can be put
into effect by the Secretary-General himself, but the new make-up
of the Security Council would require approval in the General
Assembly by two-thirds of the 191 member states, including all five
permanent members.

While the report created new offices and positions, it cast a
critical eye on the stultifying bureaucracy of the UN, calling for
a one-time voluntary redundancy offer for many staff members.

"When the panel looked around," said a senior participant who
briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, "it saw a lot of dead
wood in places where a new generation of people in their 30s and
40s with lots of field experience and original ideas feel very
frustrated and unable to advance."

The panel was very critical of the Human Rights Commission, a
body that has often brought the UN into disrepute by incorporating
some of the worst rights violators, such as Cuba, Libya and Sudan,
into its membership.

On the critical issue of the legitimacy of the use of force, a
source of crippling tension at the UN last year when Washington was
seeking Security Council authorisation to go to war in Iraq, the
panel said it found no reason to amend the UN charter's Article 51,
which restricts the use of force to countries that have been
attacked.

However, it acknowledged that a new problem had risen because of
the nature of terrorist attack, "where the threat is not imminent
but still claimed to be real: for example, the acquisition, with
allegedly hostile intent, of nuclear weapons-making
capability".

It said if the arguments for "anticipatory self-defence" in such
cases were good, they should be put to the Security Council, which
would have the power to authorise military action.

THE KEY PROPOSALS

·Proposed expansion of the Security Council to 19 or 24
members, but veto powers still restricted to five original
permanent members.

·Security Council would have the power to authorise
"anticipatory self-defence".

·New definition of terrorism as any action "that is
intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or
non-combatants ..."